2012-04-21

Card Class

Today's class, the third session of a four-session set, involved coloring with a new medium, Faber-Castell's Gelatos. (how bizarre is it that I can't find these things on the F-C website?)

First we played around with these things, which come in a tube much like Chapstick, trying watercolor paper, cheap card stock, and adhesive-backed canvas. And plain ol' water.

Then it was on to the card:

First we pulled the adhesive off the canvas and stuck it to our craft sheets. Then we water-spritzed our background stamps and smeared the stamp with the Gelatos of our choice. Then another spritz with the water and press the stamp onto the canvas, holding it there for 10 to 15 seconds or so. We also inked up (with regular stamp ink; I used Ranger's Jenni Bowlin "Brown Sugar") a text stamp--I used the HA "Old Letter Writing," and used the "stamp-off" technique to lighten up the ink just a bit, thereby making it a second-generation impression. We colored some better-quality card stock with the Gelatos and then stamped the flowers, for which I used Ranger's Archival "Sepia." The flower images are from a Hero Arts/Sizzix set which comes with dies for cutting around the images with Cuttlebugs and similar crafting devices. The sentiment was also stamped with the "Sepia." The sentiment strip was adhered directly to the canvas and decorated with pearls. Four of the flowers were adhered with PopDots, while the fifth was attached directly to the card.

The second project was turned into a magnet, but began as a 3" x 3" stretched and prepped canvas.

A little spritzing with the plain ol' water, then smeared with the Gelatos of our choice. I used the same sage-y (they call it Pistachio) green that I used on the card, then used a darker green more to the blue side of green around the edges. Once I was happy with the color smearing, I set the canvas aside to dry and used a bright yellow to color a scrap of Neenah Solar White and then stamped the butterfly in Tsukineko's VersaFine "Onyx Black," which is my go-to black for most stamping. The butterfly is from the same butterflies-and-flowers stamp-and-die set as the flower image used for the card. The sentiment is also a HA stamp, from a clear-stamp set. I stamped it a couple of times with the "Sepia" on more scraps of Neenah Solar White, then used the same Gelato colors I used for the canvas, with a bit more of the blue-green on the "Create Your Own" part.